


something more than a catalogue of non-definitive acts

by procrastinatingbookworm



Series: Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out [1]
Category: Hellblazer & Related Fandoms
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Queer Character, Childhood Trauma, Cigarettes, Friendship, Gen, Inspired by Poetry, Male Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Phone Calls & Telephones, Queer Themes, Smoking, i did too much research for this, on phone booths and the british monetary system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: Five times John called Chas, and one time Chas called John.Title and subtitles fromLitany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Outby Richard Siken.
Relationships: Chas Chandler & John Constantine, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1550992
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51





	something more than a catalogue of non-definitive acts

_I. You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?_

John searched his jacket pockets. He found three cigarettes that had come out of the carton, slightly squashed beneath a half-full box of matches, a guitar pick—strike that, two guitar picks—a crumpled 10 shilling note, fat lot of good that would do him, and a stick of gum.

No change.

“Shit.” John lit the least bent of the cigarettes, giving the payphone box a slightly desperate once-over.

Nothing but old gum.

Wait.

“I’m a bloody magician!” John declared.

He zeroed in on a piece of gum that was just about coin-sized, warming his palms with intent. Two pence, two pence. Nice and shiny. They’d only changed the coins last year. 1971. New pence. Two pence, new pence. Feathers and ribbons. The queen.

The coin clattered to the floor of the phone box. John scooped it up, pumping his fist.

Chas didn’t pick up on the first ring, or the second. John shifted from foot to foot, impatient.

When Chas did pick up, John rambled.

“Don’t ask and don’t get angry, but I need you to let me in.”

“Lost your key?” Chas said.

John tried to unbend his cigarette so the smoke wouldn’t get in his eyes, and only succeeded in getting hot ash on his hands. “Yeah.”

“Again?”

“Yeah.” John winced, shaking the ash off his palms.

“Where are you?” Chas asked.

“Payphone down the street.” John leaned out of the phone box, staring down the street to Chas’ house.

Chas’ sigh made the line crackle with static. “I can’t let you back in.”

John’s stomach lurched. “Why?”

“Mum’s asleep in front of the telly,” Chas said. “But her hellbeast isn’t, and it’ll wake her up if it sees me.”

“Chas.”

“And you know how she is.”

“Chas, I get it.” John dropped the lost cause of a cigarette and ground it out under his heel.

“So I can’t let you in.”

“Through the front door,” John noted.

“The back door screeches,” Chas’ voice was starting to waver. Damn it. “No sell.”

“Do you have an older sibling?” John cut in, before Chas worked himself up.

“Used to. He’s… I don’t know where he is. How’d you know?”

“You’re not the sneaking-out type, but you know how to.”

Chas was quiet for a while, but at least his breathing had evened out.

“Are there any good windows?” John asked.

“Maybe. How good is your balance?”

John lit a cigarette—another one of the bent ones—and hummed. “Not stellar.”

“Unfortunate. You might be able to jump from the treehouse to my bedroom window.”

John suppressed a laugh at that mental image. “How’d I get to the basement from there?”

“Just stay in my room. Bed’s big enough.”

“What’ll the old bird think?”

“She already thinks we’re shagging.”

John took a drag on his cigarette. “Could.”

“What?” Chas asked.

“What?”

“Could what?”

“Jump from the tree to your window.”

“Oh.” Chas laughed, a strange, light sound that made John’s stomach flutter. “I’ll open my window.”

_II. I walk through your dreams and invent the future._

“I need a favor.”

“Don’t you always?”

Chas was in a sour mood. John could tell from his voice. One-handed, John put a cigarette between his teeth. His lighter flicked once, twice, but didn’t light. “Bollocks.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Lighter’s out of fluid.” 

“So what’s the favor?” Chas said, with a gust of static. “Make it quick, Renee’s about to be home.”

“You know the lockup?”

“Where you keep all your magic shite, and I pay too much rent for?”

“Yeah, that one. I need you to get something out of it for me.”

Chas groaned. “And let me guess, not look at it or touch it, and mail it to you somewhere in the States, because you couldn’t just come home and get it?”

“Come on,” John said, switching the phone to his other hand, so he could search his other pocket for a box of matches. “I’m not that bad to you.”

“Ain’t you?” Chas snapped.

John winced. He felt Chas wince too.

“Nah, it’s nothing like that,” John said. “You can keep the rest of it, if you want.”

“The rest of what?”

John hissed a breath in and out, cradling the phone between ear and shoulder, trying to strike a match. “Nevermind. It’s just one thing I need, and if you leave it… I’ll tell you where to leave it.”

“Why don’t you just come get it yourself?”

“I can’t.”

Chas inhaled, as if he could smell the smoke of John’s finally-lit cigarette. “Can’t, or don’t want to?”

“What’s the difference?” John blew smoke at the roof of the phone box.

“Either you’re in some kind of trouble, or you’re being a bastard just to inconvenience me.”

“Chas,” John said, scolding. “You’re my best mate. If I were being a bastard, you’d know for sure.”

“So you are in trouble, then.”

“Just a bit. And I don’t want…” John filled his lungs with smoke, blew it back out into the air. “Someone could be watching. There’s a lot that’s valuable in that lockup. I don’t need any nasties getting their hands on it.”

“Makes sense. What’s it you need?”

“A certain book. It should be in a black duffle bag near the back. Black cover, gold pentagram embossed on the cover. Might even have my name on the title page in black Sharpie.”

“I’ll find it for you. Where do you want me to leave it?”

“Leave it…” John laughed. He felt maudlin and electric, dancing on a fault line. “Leave it on me dad’s grave.”

Chas huffed. A pen scratched, like he was taking notes. He likely was. Good, solid bloke, Chas. Reliable. “I sure know how to pick ‘em.”

If a bit rude.

“Hey, I like to have an alibi for my unconventional deeds.”

“Do you, now?”

Affection swelled up in John’s chest, bright and damning. “How soon can you do it?”

“Give me a couple of days.”

John closed his eyes. That was cutting it close, but he’d asked enough of Chas. Would be asking even more of him, if this didn’t work out.

“Thanks, mate.” 

“You…” Chas cleared his throat. “You take care of yourself.”

“You know I will. Thanks again, mate.”

John hung up. He stared at the smudged glass on the inside of the payphone box and tried to tilt his world back onto its axis.

III. _And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later._

John whistled as he dialed. He could feel each breath, sliding clean as a knife in and out of his lungs. He couldn’t remember breathing like this since he was a kid.

His own fault, but he could still be happy about it.

Chas picked up after one ring. “You’d better be calling to apologize. I’m not doing you any bloody favors until you do.”

John stopped whistling. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. He was, undoubtedly, _in for it._ “Apologize? What for, mate?”

“I thought you were dead.” There was something unfathomable in Chas’ voice, some damning fury.

“So did I,” John stalled, knowing full well what he was being blamed for. “It was touch and go for a while there, if I’m honest.

“Shut your _fucking_ gob.”

John stopped, more out of shock than anything else. It was like running into a brick wall. “Eh, Chas?”

“You could have called me. Could have sent a note. Hell, could have knocked on my bloody door! Not just left me thinking you were dead somewhere!”

“I meant to call you,” John started. “If I got out clean, but one thing led to another, and you know how it happens…”

“Yeah,” Chas growled. “I’m not exactly the first thing on your mind.”

“You’re my best mate,” John cut in.

“That doesn’t mean shite.” There was a high, tenuous note in Chas’ voice.

“Maybe,” John admitted. “I’m sorry, Chas. I ought to have let you know right off.”

“I didn’t—” Chas’ voice shattered. The shards of his grief buried themselves in John’s throat. “You didn’t let me say goodbye. The last thing I did was shout at you.”

“Chas.”

“I wondered for _weeks,_ ” Chas went on, in an emotionally-fraught tirade that John should know better than to interrupt with anything more than an acknowledgement that he was still listening. “Weeks, if I’d just been nicer to you, you might’ve asked for my help, or… or _something.”_

“I wouldn’t have,” John cut in. He could wallow in his own guilt, but he didn’t have the faintest idea how to deal with someone else’s. Best to cut _that_ train of Chas’ ramble short. “I was bent on going me own way, there was nothing you could’ve done. All right?”

Perhaps shocked by John’s honesty, Chas stopped to breathe. There was a wetness to it, a ragged edge. Grief and rage, and _relief._

John felt rather sheepish about the first two, but he had to pat himself on the back for the third. It wasn’t often that people were glad to see him. After the stunt he’d just pulled getting himself out of the muck, he deserved to bask a little.

“I’m still pissed at you.”

“Of course, duck.”

“You’re a right bastard.”

John found himself grinning at the phone. “Count on it. Now, I called to ask—”

Chas hung up on him. John deserved that one.

_IV. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out._

John woke, breathless, in a cold sweat, to a room full of ghosts.

He’d dreamed of them, and so they were conjured.

They didn’t speak, just stared. Their presence, their empty eyes, their death-wounds, were enough. 

John choked. He had a quip on his tongue, aimed to deflect. He had a shield of haughty pride. He was armed with righteous anger, armored by his selfless motive, but the guilt came anyway, past his defenses, crawling past his parted lips and filling up his lungs. 

He couldn’t breathe.

Half on instinct, he staggered down the hall.

It took John three tries to dial Chas’ number. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He needed a cigarette, he needed _something._

“It’s three in the bloody morning, John.” Chas growled, as soon as he picked up. “What the hell can you possibly need?”

John opened his mouth to explain himself, and an ugly sound wrenched out of his throat.

Faintly, he heard Chas speaking. His tone was vivid, flattened out in shock with a hitch of worry in the middle, but the words were lost in a haze.

“John?” he heard eventually. “John, you with me? _John._ Come on, mate, breathe a little.”

John _breathed_ , gasping like a drowning man. He needed a cigarette, but they were still in his room, and his ghosts were there.

“John. You’ve got to breathe, all right?”

He was like London, Chas was. A living, lovely thing, all bound up with knowledge under a solid exoskeleton of reliable truth.

“You’re not talking sense, John. What’s that about London?”

“Nothing, mate,” John gasped. He was on the ground, the phone in one hand, the other holding a fistful of his hair. “Don’t mind me.”

“Someone’s got to, don’t they?” Chas sighed. “Light yourself a fag, before you work yourself up again.”

“Can’t.”

“Haven’t heard that from you before. Why can’t you?”

“Left the pack in my room, and there’s bloody ghosts in there.”

“One of those nights, is it?”

John felt annoyance prickle through the residual panic. “I’m not crazy, Chas.”

“I know you aren’t.” Chas reassured.

John growled. He wanted to hit his head against the wall, but there was no point in that, so he settled for tugging on his hair.

“You have a nightmare?” Chas asked. Bugger him. what did he know?

“Yeah.” John was tired. His eyes hurt. His _chest_ hurt. “Usual shite. Dead friends. Gratuitous gore-shots, like someone’s standing just out of frame with a spray bottle of blood.”

“Doing shit that makes sense at the time, an’ scares you when you wake up?” Chas asked, in that painfully gentle way of his. 

“Something like that.” John shut his eyes, forced them open again. “I’m not mental, Chas, I’m not. It’s real.”

“I know it’s real. You think I’d let you wander around if I thought you were barking?”

“Dunno.” It was hard to think. “Would you?” 

“I wouldn’t.”

John could breathe again, but his throat felt… wrong. Tight. “You wouldn’t leave me?”

“‘Course not, John. You’re my best mate. What’s gotten into you?”

“Dunno,” John repeated. He shut his eyes. “You’re too good to me, you know that?”

“Maybe. I’m alright with it, though.” Chas’ voice was quiet. Like a stone thrown into a dry well. John waited for the splash, and it never came. “It ain’t a bad life.”

“Yeah?” John asked. He knew he sounded pathetic. It didn’t really matter.

“You want me to come over?” Chas asked.

“Would you?”

“I can.”

John thought about his ghosts, about the carpet-fibers, about the sting of his scalp as he pulled his hair.

“Please.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Chas said, like he’d been planning for that answer. “Remember to breathe.”

John inhaled. Exhaled. He listened to the dial tone. Fifteen minutes.

_V. Build me a city and call it Jerusalem._

It was raining. John could feel the pervasive chill of it, the way his clothes and hair stuck to his skin, raindrops trailing lines down his face, like crawling insects.

He should get out of the rain. There was a shiver starting at the base of his spine, a numbness closing in on his fingerbones. 

Where was he going to go?

Christ. He was just standing in the rain, waiting for deliverance.

He didn’t even believe in God.

“Sir?”

There was someone standing in front of him. John couldn’t make out a gender, or any real distinguishing features. Just a flash of purple under the hood of their white slicker that might have been a lock of hair.

“Do you need something?”

John blinked at them. He tried to summon up his voice, unravel rehearsed words from the inside of his chest. “Two pence for the payphone, love?”

They rooted in their raincoat pocket and pulled out a two pence coin. John lifted one numb hand, letting them drop the coin into it.

He blinked, and he was out of the rain, and the phone was ringing, ringing.

His hands were cold.

Chas picked up. “Hello?”

“Chas,” John breathed.

“Let me guess, mate. You need a ride somewhere?”

“No, I’m—” John’s throat closed.

“John?”

John buried his face in the crook of his free arm. He held the phone away from his face, but he knew Chas still heard, from the way he sighed.

“Could you tell me where you are, John?”

John looked up. The rain was streaking down across the windows of the phone box, too thick for John to make out a street sign.

“I… I can’t—”

“That’s all right,” Chas cut in. “You just catch your breath. Are you in any danger?”

John shook his head. “No.” He couldn’t stop his chest from heaving, quick and panicked.

“That’s good, then.”

It wasn’t good. He couldn’t think when there wasn’t something to run from. Couldn’t focus. He felt like a puppet on live wire strings, only dancing while the electricity was on.

“I’m glad you called.”

John could barely hear Chas over the rain, over his own ragged breathing. “Yeah?”

“You don’t, usually.”

It was true. John never remembered to keep in touch.

“Do you want to come by my flat? Renee’s visiting Geraldine.”

John hid his face in his arm again. “You don’t mind?”

“So long as you smoke outside. Renee might take the top of my head off if she smells your cigarettes around.”

“That’s fair,” John wrenched out. “I’m not good for you.”

“None of that,” Chas said, with such authority that John had to be quiet. “The rain’s slowing down.”

It was. John lifted his head. He remembered, more clearly, who he was, and where, and why. “I’m ‘round by St. James’s Park. I was meeting… someone.”

“I’ll find you,” Chas told him. “Just hold tight.”

_i. I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together._

John nearly jumped out of his skin when the phone rang. He’d just gotten settled, too.

If it took him a few rings to pick up the phone, who cared? It was probably a bloody telemarketer anyway.

It was Chas.

“H’lo then, duck.” John said, swerving wide around annoyance and ending up in sickly sweet.

“Hey, John,” Chas replied.

The hair went up all along John’s neck and arms. Something was wrong.

“You in trouble?” John hazarded.

Chas exhaled, slow and laugh-like. “Not as such.”

If there wasn’t already one in his mouth, John would have been reaching for a cigarette. “What is it, then?”

Chas was silent for a long time, breathing harshly into the phone. John imagined cold gunmetal against the back of Chas’ head, or Renee’s temple. Or pressed, cold as dread, into Geraldine’s stomach, or pointed at little Trish’s head where she was standing up in her cot...

“It’s my birthday.”

John laughed. He couldn’t help it—sheer relief forced the sound out of his chest.

“Well, I see how it is,” Chas said, and the panic jumped back into John’s chest.

“Wait, Chas, I’m sorry.” The apology must have caught Chas off guard, because he didn’t hang up. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I got myself worked up, wondering if you were being threatened, or something. You don’t tend to call me.”

The line was silent.

“Chas?”

“Still here.”

“Happy birthday,” John said, a little wretchedly.

Chas huffed a laugh. “Yeah. Don’t suppose I have to explain…”

John thought of his own birthdays, of cigarette burns and shards of broken glass, of ripping up the old scabs over festering guilt. “Nah, I can guess.”

“Thanks.” Chas exhaled static down the line. “Didn’t want to anyway.

John shifted from foot to foot. “Do you want me to come by, or…?”

“Just… stay on the phone?”

John tapped ash off the end of cigarette. Inhaled smoke, exhaled the last of his terror.

“Yeah, mate, I can do that.”

Chas just sat at the other end of the line, breathing. Listening to John breathe, probably. Hearing the hitch deep and low between John’s lungs, the bubble of tar that had already been persuaded into cancer once before.

Across the line, John heard the click of a lighter, the crispness of the first drag of a cigarette.

“Silk Cut or Marlboro?”

“Silk Cut. You left ‘em in the cab.”

That explained where John’s spare pack had gone. “Does your missus smoke?”

“Used to. She quit when Geraldine was born.”

“She a Marlboro gal?”

“She wasn’t picky.”

John snickered.

“Shut it,” Chas said, but he laughed too.

“She out tonight, then?” John asked.

“What’s got you asking about Renee so much?”

“Just wondering why you came to me. I’m not exactly the most comforting chap.”

“She don’t get it, is all.” Chas sighed. “Why a bloke wouldn’t like his own birthday.”

“You have a row?”

“Not as such.”

John could hear the twist of tension coming back into Chas’ voice, so he changed the subject. “We ought to go out. Not for your birthday, mind. Next week. Just as mates. Seems a while since we’ve done that.”

“Yeah, we ought to.” Christ, you’d think John put the stars in the sky, for how pleased Chas sounded. “I ain’t seen you in awhile.”

“I’ve been out, haven’t I?” John shut his eyes, suddenly feeling very tired. He felt a bit like his sister Cheryl; sitting on the carpet beside the landline, gabbing away with one friend or another until the old man came stomping up the stairs and told her to quit it.

“You’ve been in the wind, as far as I’m concerned. You ought to get a cell phone.”

“I’d just break it or lose it. Who’d call me, anyhow?”

“I’d call,” Chas said. “If you wanted me to.”

John opened his eyes. “I’d like you to.”

“I will, then.” Chas promised. “I’ll call.”


End file.
